We recently changed our hosting provider and I have not as yet had a chance to hook up a spam filter to my emails. All of a sudden I have many friends who now give me the latest information on those hot stocks, best Hoodia suppliers and of course how to get my man to satisfy me - all day and night! Just in case I miss the message they make sure the subject title of the emails catch my attention.

It shows that blogging is becoming viable both in terms of running them and in terms of working for them. It's been happening in the US for a while but it's only just begun to happen here.

The other thing it shows is just how niche blogging has become. One of the jobs advertised is for a "Widow Blogger at b5media". I thought it said Windows blogger, but it actually says "Widow" as in partner with deceased spouse.

Here's something that will please me, Barry Hall and my colleague Jano and scores of other fans of Prison Break ... don't wait until February, you can find out right now what happens to Michael, Lincoln and the whole gang in the first episode of the second series.

The second season of the hit show only premiered on Monday night in the US and now Fox and TV.com have made it available to anyone in the world with a broadband connection to watch right now.

According to Reuters, "critical consumers are calling Dell notebooks 'the Hindenbook', a reference to the Hindenburg airship, which exploded in 1937".

Hunting around, however, the only references I could find to "Hindenbook" date back to 1995 when Apple's PowerBook 5300 series was given that moniker after a few of them burst into flames as a result of faulty Sony-made Lithium-ion batteries, according to an entry in the sometime reliable Wikipedia.

Today, another report of a suspect Dell surfaced, this time in Florida. The owner claims that the laptop caught fire and burnt out his house.

We have also been sent a number of photos of other suspected Dell incidents:

A colleague was expressing his profound disappointment with his 3G mobile phone service the other day, saying he'd just about given up on using any of the extras.

It made me think about how slow my service had become in recent weeks (and we use different service providers).

I've been using the phone to check my email and browse a few sites on the way in to work. But increasingly, over the past few weeks, I've found that the connections are slow and unreliable.
It's bit like surfing the internet circa 1996.

Is this just me, or is this a widespread perception/experience? My guess is that after the novelty wears off, most people are probably be using about 10 per cent of the functions on their 3G phones.

Our 'moral guardians' believe that the internet is a portal to hell, which of course is true, but it can also lead to many other destinations, including better sex. If we look past the sizeable chunk of porn (which I'm not sure bares any resemblance to 'real' sex anyway), there is a vast array of information and tools to help us explore our sensuality or at least fuel our fascination with all things naughty.

Yesterday morning at about 11am, Louisa (who works with me) asked Michael Dell, founder of Dell Inc, the following question at a press conference in Sydney:

"I was just wondering about the [exploding latop] incident in Osaka and whether Dell had managed to find out any more about that? It was believed to be linked to lithium ion batteries and a possible failure there and I was wondering if there's any development on that and whether it was related to last year's lithium ion battery recall?"

Here's another one that reportedly caught fire. This one ignited a box of ammunition and caused truck - owned by Thomas Forqueran - to explode. Luckily it happened in the Mojave Desert so no one was hurt.

Completely slipped my mind that Sunday was the 15th anniversary of the the day the web went world wide.

That was the day, as the BBC puts it, "on which links to the fledgling computer code for the www were put on the alt.hypertext discussion group so others could download it and play with it".

Where would we be without it? It's hard to imagine.

I remember August 1991 well because it was the month that the abortive coup took place in the Soviet Union. Gorby was rolled by some hardliners and then Boris Yeltsin rode into town, climbed on top of a tank and the rest ... well you can read about it here.

The Wired blog Cult of Mac says the incident was reported by a reader named Kevin.

"Just a warning to everyone: we woke up this morning at 6am because the apartment was filled with smoke and our laptop was on fire. It wasn't plugged in, and it had been put to 'sleep' over night. It's only a year old, so the lesson is: DON'T LEAVE YOUR LAPTOP ON UNATTENDED!"

According to the prevailing theory, we live in an age of participatory media. The day of the passive, reader/viewer/listener is over. They - what New York academic Jay Rosen calls "the people formerly known as the audience" - now want to be involved.

Most of the big media players have responded by calling on their readers/viewers/listeners to submit everything from news tips and comments to photos and videos.

At the other end of the spectrum, many indy players also see a chance to carve out a niche and service a need. The South Korean website OhMyNews being the best example of this.

Over here, indy players have not yet emerged in any serious way. So it'll be interesting to see how Perth-based mother-of-four and aspiring grassroots media mogul Bronwen Clune goes with her bold entry into this hot, hot zone.

Google Earth spotters caught sight of this formation and after a bit of discussion, they came up with this startling theory: that the land formation was an exact scale model of piece of disputed land on the Sino-Indian border and was part of some military training operation.

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